Patients across North Staffordshire are set to benefit from an NHS drive to recruit 20,000 physios, pharmacists and paramedics to work alongside under pressure GPs.

The new staff will take responsibility for some of the 300 million bookings made with practices each year. They will also provide continuing care to patients in the community.

NHS England says it will free up GPs’ to spend more time with the sickest patients. The average appointment lasts about eight minutes, which GPs say is not enough time to deal with the complex issues an ageing population presents with.

The Loomer Medical Group – which runs six surgeries across Chesterton, Tunstall, Longton, Butt Lane, and Newcastle – already has trained health professionals who work to support GPs. The group has also been chosen to pilot eConsult, an online portal which allows patients to self-check their symptoms and receive medical attention at anytime of the day or night.

Dr Jack Aw, of Loomer Road Surgery in Chesterton, said: “We have already got nurse practitioners, physiotherapists, clinical pharmacists as well as GPs, and we have got an elderly care team which goes out to visit patients and they work the district nurses.

“This is not ‘a GP on the cheap’, this is providing a much more complex set of care needs to the patient.

“For example, most GPs haven’t got a clue about social care. Because pharmacists have such rigorous training, there skill set makes them ideal to do that safety checking around medication.

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“It means GPs can spend more time with the patients who really need it.

“We are taking part in a national pilot of eConsult. At the moment, as a GP, you might see 100 patients, but of those, you only needed to see 20 of them and you wish you could spend more time with them – but you don’t know that until you see them. Receptionists are trained to filter out some of that, but eConsult will be a way of patients getting medical help directly, at any time.

“That will help to better respond to demand.”

Dr Aw says the technology, which uses artificial intelligence, will offer advice to a patient and could also determine whether a patient needs to see a doctor or another health professional, and how urgent the need is.

It will also allow patients to receive information about things like blood tests, together with advice, at any time of the day or week.

The five-year contract announced by NHS England, which amounts to the biggest overhaul of GP services in 15 years, gives practices almost £1 billion across five years, while another £1.8 billion will be invested to support the formation of primary care networks.

There are currently just over 34,000 GPs working in England, alongside 11,000 practice nurses.

But despite promises to recruit more GPs, the number of full-time equivalents working has actually fallen by 400 in the past three years, the BBC reports.

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The Royal College of GPs estimates the nation is 6,000 GPs short of what it needs.

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens said: “This five-year deal unarguably represents the biggest boost to primary care in more than 15 years, giving patients more convenient services at their local GP surgery while breaking down the divide between family doctors and community health services.

(Image: PA)

“It provides the practical foundation for the big service improvements in the NHS long-term plan.

“Patients across England - in towns, villages and cities - will all begin to see the benefits, beginning this year.

“And it allows us to keep all that’s best about British general practice while future-proofing it for the decade ahead.”

Dr Paul Scott, chairman of North Staffs Local Medical Committee and a senior partner at Silverdale Medical Centre, welcomed the plan as a positive step forward. But he said there are long-running concerns around GPs’ pensions, which have not been resolved and have led to many doctors leaving the profession; and about allowing the national 111 telephone service to access GP practice appointments.

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“Patients are carefully filtered by receptionists and right now, that’s working,” he said.

“The 111 service tends to medicalise everything and make it overly serious. It could give backdoor access to 111 filling our appointments with people we don’t really need to see. It uses excessive safety precautions – a lot of the conversations people have with 111 are about trying to persuade them not to send an ambulance. It is so safe it is dangerous.

“That could mean the people who really need to see us can’t get an appointment.”

Dr Paul Scott, chairman of North Staffs Local Medical Committee.

But Dr Scott added: “[The new five year contract] is a massive step forward. We all have capacity issues, the number of GPs continue to drop and new GPs are working less because it is so intense. We need more time with patients who really need to see us.”

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“It takes seven or eight years to train a GP and Health Education England have been dysfunctional in addressing those workforce needs.

“It will be better for patients. But patients have to understand that seeing a pharmacist or a practice nurse is not a dumbing down from seeing a GP, they are seeing the correct professional. A GP should be for the more serious cases.

“These health professionals are trained to escalate a problem to a more specialist clinician if there is that need.”